A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

To go on a starvation diet in terms of the comma (including the
inverted ones that designate speech), as Eimear McBride does in her
remarkable, harshly satisfying first novel, may not seem a
particularly drastic discipline, set beside such feats as eliminating
the letter ‘e’ (Perec’s La Disparition, Englished by Gilbert Adair
as A Void) or telling Ophelia’s side of the story using only the
words Shakespeare allots her (Paul Griffiths’s Let Me Tell You).
McBride compensates by scattering full stops with a liberal,
raisin-loaf-making hand, but her avoidance of commas is enough to
shake up other conventions.